ayon de l'amour!"

I listened without a laugh, and won the eternal gratitude of the writer.
Nothing could be clearer than that, whatever the effusion might owe to
the inspiration of Cupid, Apollo had no share in its charm. On my part,
it would probably have been an act of the truest friendship, to have bid
him burn his tablets, forswear poetry for ever, and regard himself as
forbidden the temptations of the maids of Parnassus. But I should have
broken his heart. I took the simpler but more effectual cure--I bade him
find out this idol, and marry her. Before I forget him and his sorrows,
let me mention, that he took my advice, and that, on my return to the
Continent some years after, I found the poet transferred into the
benedict, with a pretty wife at his side, and a circle of lively
children at his knee--an active, thriving, and rational member of the
community. I always quote the doctor, for the superiority of the
soothing system. The vinegar of criticism would have festered the wounds
of his vanity; the art of (must I call it) flattery healed them. It left
a scar, I acknowledge; for the doctor still wrote verses, and still had
a lurking propensity for climbing the slippery slope of poetic renown.
But the realities of life are fortunate correctives to this passion,
and, like Piron, luckily

"Il ne fut rien
Pas meme academician."

But on this night our "intercourse of souls" was interrupted by one of
those painful evidences of the renewal of hostilities which shows war in
its truest aspect. A long column of vehicles, which we had seen moving
for some time across the plain, and whose movement, by the torches of
the escort, looked from the ramparts like the trailing of an immense
phosphoric serpent, approached the gates. The announcement was soon made
that it was a large detachment of prisoners and wounded, who had arrived
from the desperate but decisive battle in Flanders. All the medical
officers of the garrison were immediately in requisition; and the sights
which I saw, even when standing at the gate, as the carts and cars
rolled over the drawbridge, were sufficient to startle feelings more
used to such terrible demonstrations of the folly or the frenzy of the
world. But this was no time to indulge indolent sensibilities. Of
course, I have no desire to enter into the startling details of that
spectacle. But mastering myself so far, as to volunteer my attendance
for the time in the hospital, the thought often o